Hey Folks

Our website, including registration, will be going live on 2/22 so stay tuned.

Site Visit

Last Friday (2/11) we visited The Mandalay Bay for a site visit.  Site visits are about trying to visualize where everything will go, where to hold sessions, where to hold labs, where to put CommNet and those sorts of things.  We also meet all the facility staff.  I was witness to an awesome butting of technical heads between our tech guy and the senior network engineer ... I mean ... we _only_ wanted to have access to his main switch ;-)  We also checked out the party venue which is pretty sweet.  And for anyone who thinks a Friday visit to Vegas sounds like an excuse for a comapny paid for trip to Vegas, I flew in at 10pm Thursday and out again at 4pm Friday ... no time to stop and visit the casino!

The Call for Papers

Last Friday (2/11) the Call For Papers closed.  I was overwhelmed by the number of responses we received, over 140 session submissions for the 100 or so sessions slots we have available.  We won't be able to host all the submissions so if you made a submission, first, thank you and second we'll be going through them all really soon now ... which brings me to my next point.

Session Triage

Next Tuesday (2/22) we have our final session triage.  The session triage is when we take all the suggested session titles/abstracts (internal and external) and decide which ones we'll have at the conference.  Primarily we're looking for ones that we think are interesting and content that you can't find elsewhere.  Secondarily we look for sessions that will interest a lot of people.  Once we complete the triage we'll be able to publish the list of sessions soon afterwards so you'll get a chance to see what the sessions will be at the conference.

Keynote Demos

Next week we have our first keynote demos meeting.  That's where we start to brainstorm the ideas for the 3, 4 or 5 cool demos that we want to share through the keynote.  Last year we saw Ori build his blog client in under ten minutes.  Wonder what we'll come up with this year?

James